Social media and Internet technologies have enabled any computer user, local organizations and small business to easily publish content. Blogging, Twitter and Facebook have become the main channels for user content publication. Local organizations, libraries and local businesses have transitioned their communications from physical media: newspapers, physical bulletin boards, fliers and Yellow Pages to informational websites and more recently social media outlets to attempt to connect with their audiences.
Although information publication has become relatively easy due to web-publication technologies, reaching geographically local users continues to be difficult due to the content discovery mechanism driven by Internet search engines.
A search engine indexes, collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast access and relevant information retrieval. Search engines incorporate interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science.
Today, leading search engine providers use a variety of algorithms to index and retrieve information based on user keyword search. To enable a general search service applicable to all web users, these search engines index and rank content based on general mathematical properties, including web page link analysis in order to determine the likely most relevant content based on key words provided by the user. The number of external links to a given web page affects the ranking of the web page within search results. Users are presented content in “rank order” based on the score determined by the search engine's indexing algorithms.
Unfortunately, traditional Internet search must index an extremely large number of web pages and this limits the type of algorithms that can be applied. These algorithms tend to be extremely general and large amounts of content that might be relevant do not appear within given search results, as they are not linked by other sites on the web. Due to the fact content that is highly geographical topical (local content) competes with the entire body of Internet content for rank positioning. In general, the more local the web page, the fewer external links the content is likely to have. For every position lower on the search rank, a user is 10% less likely to click through a link. Content is effectively buried when ranked off the first page of search results.
For example, if user searches for the terms “Italian food”, search engines return the set of all ranked content on the Internet of “Italian Food”. Recently, search engines have attempted to improve search relevancy by geo-locating users via IP address and narrowing a user's search by adding the user's location context to their searches and providing more geographically targeted search results. This change enables local content to better compete against Internet wide content. However, users still have to “guess” the best search terms when attempting to find local data and the data is presented as a long list of disconnected items. Consequently, there is always room for innovations and improvements.